Saturday Night Radio Drama - Charles Tidler - Pocket City Blues

When Things Go Wrong

The Double Door 

Rose Violin 

Woke Up This Morning

A series about a narrator- lead character, Horton Spring, his brat of a 14-year-old son, his hostile ex wife and all kinds of strange people and odd problems.  I listened to them a long time ago and thought they were pretty off-beat.  I was going to post something else but decided to post these as an example of how off-beat shows can be done when not much money is involved. I've mentioned what Rod Serling said about his fond memories of freedom when he was doing radio drama because all his supervisors cared about was filling air time. These are kind of Rod Serlingish.  It's a bit heavy on the beat poet stuff but Horton isn't the asshole that the beats were. 

There used to be a website that had the credits for all of the Mystery Project shows but I can't find it.  They have full credits given at the end of them, as I recall.  Listening to the first one again I think I'll listen to them all again tonight as I'm transplanting.  They have a real late Saturday night being at home alone vibe. 

The Actor's Apprenticeship | Documentary | Feat. Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton, Derek Jacobi

With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.

George Burns

I doubt anyone much remembers how my practice of posting a Saturday Night Radio Drama started, it started when I got into a brawl with one of the people who troll me after I wondered why I'd never heard of actors, on their own, as a part of practicing their art, getting together to go through great plays by themselves with other actors trying to learn how to act, the way that musicians routinely do as part of their practice.  

That some might or might have, I don't doubt, though I've never heard any of the actors I've known talk about doing it. It's something you'd think was as much a no-brainer as a musician practicing the repertoire of their instrument or voice or a painter drawing pictures or a writer writing stuff they rip up and don't present to the public.   An actor or director who doesn't practice is about as likely to produce good work as a musician who never does, it's not likely to happen. 

That was before I knew that radio drama, in most places not much done on radio anymore, was being transformed by writers-actors-directors into computer based audio drama much of which is as bad as most movies and TV but which doesn't waste anything like a tiny fraction of the resources and time that those most expensive and, so, least creative of media do.   And, being a voluntary effort, they are as creative as the creators, the writers or improvisers or actors or directors want to make them - no producers or backers or a paying audience to answer to.   The audio-drama that stinks is a good thing, it's trying and trying is better than not trying and it's a chance to make the mistakes that you have to make to get better. 

Somewhere in that brawl I pointed out the excellent series of TV productions based on Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe that A&E financed in the 1990s, which were some of the best TV ever produced with some of the most incredibly good actors I've ever seen but which must have cost a fortune to produce because they reproduced, slavishly, the period look and costumes and settings of the period of the books, between the 1930s to the 1960s.  Though Archie,  the fine Timothy Hutton, and Nero Wolfe, the excellent, late, Maury Chaykin,  didn't seem to age along the way.  I contrasted that with the excellent radio production that the CBC did of many of the same Rex Stout novels, the ones I'd read quite faithfully reproduced in full-cast productions but without the cost of visuals.  I'd love to know the cost difference between the two.  The acting in both was excellent,  though I certainly would never talk down the work of some of the extraordinarily fine actors in the TV version, Kari Matchett, Christine Brubaker, Debra Monk, James Tolkan, Robert Bockstael, etc.  in some ways I think it would have been better if there weren't the visuals.  I'd rather have foregone the costumes and sets for having more of them. 

This video of some of the best British actors, many of whom, such as Judi Dench,  have done radio acting, lamenting the decline of municipal and regional repertory theaters in Britain - the apprentice system that makes so many British actors so much better than most American actors - is probably something that is not going to be turned around.  I think any actor or director, any would-be playwright who wants to be better at what they do should consider that their best chance is to do what a musician who wants to get better has to do and that if they want their practice to be presented to a public that their best hope would be to buy a good, inexpensive digital recorder, learn to get the most out of it that they can, write their best script and do it in audio form.  They can listen to it themselves and learn from their mistakes because unless things turn out a lot different from how they appear to, they're not going to get to do it on stage.   They won't learn much from doing it on TV or movie set, they probably won't ever get the chance to try.

What is said about people who get a chance and who, once they've made a splash have no learned skills to back it up getting spit out by TV and the movies is all too true.  If they'd gotten their chance when they didn't have the money to get into serious trouble before a public - before the inevitable amnesia that TV and the movies induce sets in - they might walk away with at least their dignity intact.  I wonder if there would be fewer stories of self-destruction associated with show biz if they went through an apprenticeship.  

I love theater when it's good.  I love it when it is fun but more when it says something.  I think you're entirely more likely to get that through audio drama than through something with sets and makeup. 

Wrapping Up For Now But, No Doubt, To Be Continued - Hate Mail

One of the things in current American language use that bothers me the most is the misuse of the word "tragedy" to describe intentional mass murders and other horrible crimes committed with full intent by human beings.  Those are not "tragedies" that happen at the whims of the gods or because of fate or the atheist-materialist-scientistic god of random chance, they are crimes.   It romanticizes them, lessens them, in the apt words of Hans Kung, it does what he explicitly and strongly states IS NOT TO BE DONE, it reinterprets it, it lessens it, it adds some kind of aura of glory to it.   To turn intentional criminals into the mere toys of external forces is to let the the criminals off too easy, them and, the extent to which others up to and including the entire society that they arose in, it enables that to be repeated. 

There are crimes which are tragic but the only ones that I think are relevant are when those are committed by someone driven beyond tolerance by circumstances, either through mental debility or through their own terrible suffering.  A person driven past the point of endurance at witnessing of fearing unendurable pain for a loved one may be led to kill them, someone who is starving may shoot someone during a robbery (though they are probably more liable to being killed, themselves).  But that is a rare circumstance that would require a different and longer general discussion.  Only looking deeper at the circumstances of a particular case could do them justice.

That my general objection to that confusion of language is related, I suspect, to the distinction that must be made between evil and suffering.   Suffering is a general condition, it is the condition of much of if not all of sentient life.  Evil is always suffered by someone, a person or animal or other sentient being but not all suffering is a result of evil, the intentional or indifferent causing of pain by a reasoning creature - a created being who thinks.  It might be something which only people do, I don't know how the mind of a cat tormenting an animal before it kills it thinks, how aware they are of the pain and terror they are inflicting.  If that's related to the delight that people take in causing pain,I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me. if it was like it.  I don't know if cats have an excuse for that,  I know people don't in so far as people can comprehend it.*

In the passage I posted from Hans Kung's book On Being A Christian yesterday he said two things that contradict the accusation that "Christianity is all about causing pain and death".

Suffering and death remain as an attack on man's life.  Suffering is not to be reinterpreted belittled or glorified.  Nor is it to be accepted stoically, apathetically, unemotionally.  And certainly, it should not be sought masochistically, making asceticism a source of pleasure.  It is to be fought by every human means - as must be made clearer later - in both the individual and the social sphere, in both persons and structures. 

The Crucifixion of Jesus was, by human design, a "freak show"  as intended by the Roman authorities who killed him, not by his followers, those who after his Resurrection started what became the Christian religion.  Part of the use of crucifixion as an instrument of imperial state terror was its public torture and degradation, the spectacle used as terror is always meant to be used as a tool for controlling "the masses" of making them afraid to exercise freedom and demand justice.** 

He also said:

It [evil, pain] is to be fought by every human means - as must be made clearer later - in both the individual and the social sphere, in both persons and structures.  

"As must be made clearer, later."  This book is part of what I think even Kung considered something of a trilogy of long,  extensively documented, tightly argued books, including Does God Exist? and Eternal Life?   I may not get around to going into that clarification as Hans Kung presented it but I will point out that it is obvious from the teachings of Jesus, Paul, etc.  that that is a task given to the people who would like to be followers of Jesus,  that they become that by doing the will of God.   He would certainly have meant as set out in The Law and in his teachings.  

If you were really interested, get Kung's books and read them, look up as many of his citations as you can if you doubt he's a reliable scholar.  He is quite excellent, as it happens. 

The Mosaic Law is probably the most radical prescription for lessening evil and suffering yet set out, especially as modified by the teachings of Jesus - all those death penalties were certainly not intended to be retained by Jesus.  That is what is asked of human beings, humans only having the capacity to do what humans can do.   The periods when churches and religious establishments did quite a bit of evil through holding earthly power are definitively in opposition to the words of a man they claimed to believe spoke with the authority of God.  Which supports the Gospel statement of Jesus that his kingdom was not of this Earth, no matter what "most Christian monarchs" most "Christian" prime ministers, presidents, legislators, judges, "justices" princes, etc. wanted to pretend, they could't possibly know even the most well known of the teachings of Jesus and believed they were acting as those commandments told them to.  "Do unto others . . . "  "Those who live by the sword will die by the sword,"  "Judge not lest you be judged."  

I'd think humanity had enough to be getting on with, to the extent we are humanly able, to ending the evil that we choose to do.  Making that distinction as to what is in our power and what isn't would certainly go a long way to doing that. 

The endless taunting of Christians by raising the question of evil, demanding an answer in terms atheists, materialists and the cult of scientism would demand should be treated for the absurdity that it is.  If that has not been done in the period since the Book of Job was written down, it's not going to be given.  Even the Buddha who is held by so many millions as the best hope of a non-theological solution to the more general problem of pain didn't present an answer in those terms.  Atheism has certainly never given one nor do I believe it ever really cared about the problem.   

If that is dissatisfying to them, or, rather their polemical purpose, well, life's tough, ain't it.  Tell me what happened before the Big Bang, or even right after it.  Tell me why the atheist god of random chance indicates that by an incredibly enormous factor to one, we shouldn't be here and that all of the atheist attempts to get out of that cannot escape the most absurd of mythological entities, multiverses - either simultaneous or in a clearly absurd infinite regression in pasts that would have to come "before" every indication we have, now, time begin. 

The solution as presented by Hans Kung is one that is there, it doesn't end pain, it doesn't end evil, not in human understanding.  It doesn't even give an explanation of it but it does present that if humans cannot know the answer to it they can find a way out of it.  But, as I pointed out, the pain that is the vehicle, the substance and the meaning of evil is the most intimate of experiences - it is entirely "subjective" - and no answer which will satisfy anyone is going to be had except as the most personal of choices.  There will be no "objective" explanation of it.  Human evil is the responsibility of human beings.  So is ending it. 

------------------------------------

And a related, insoluble problem. 

The most difficult situation in trying to live this way I can think of is the killing of someone who is a present danger to someone else,  I have absolutely no answer to how that is compatible with the teachings of Jesus though I can't bring myself to condemn it when that is what it really is.  In Matthew, even as he is being arrested to be crucified, Jesus rejected violent protection but even then he said that his death was part of his purpose.  I don't know how to relate that to the problem of killing someone in defense of someone else or yourself.  If there's one thing I know, I'm not Jesus and I doubt anyone else is.  Short that present danger, there is absolutely no way to justify killing someone who could be prevented from harming other people by non-lethal means.  

The "just war" theory associated with Augustine along with all of the late classical, medieval and modern Christian theology that so obviously violates the teachings of Jesus on behalf of worldly power leads into nothing but the justified rejection of what calls itself "Christianity" which has nothing to do with Jesus or what I'm talking about here.  

*  I wonder if redemption doesn't include the idea that even the worst of us can, perhaps ultimately will fully know our guilt and will be offered the choice of rejecting that.   I like to think it does.  The argument that that is what the New Testament and even some of the First Testament indicates is possible.  

**  Remember that the next time you hear some play-lefty excusing the use of terror by dictators they support or terrorism as a tool of "revolution" or change.  Terrorism is always a certain signal that those who use it will almost certainly not turn out to be democrats or "social democrats".  Though there have been extremely ruthless despots who used terrorism who were not atheists, in the modern history of the West and those who have been influenced by the west, especially as fascists and Marxists, the worst of those have been anti-religious.  That is a simple fact of history.

No one ever followed the teachings of Jesus into using terror.  You can't do that while doing to them what you would have done to you, loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you, etc.  You can't even hold them as a slave, slavery being entirely about treating others as you would never want them to treat you.

Dušan Bogdanović interview

This is the guy whose music I am told is "dry as dust"  

who, a couple of years ago the same troll stupidly and absurdly ("surd" meaning unable to hear) called an "academic serialist."   Listen to his answer to the question asked after 3:00 in which he's asked how much freedom for the performer is contained in his music.  

I think what troll guy meant about the Chromatic Prelude and Fugue posted yesterday is that it's too hard for a stupid guy to follow counterpoint.  And that guy pretends he's a professional musician. 

Reason can never show why this is so, why this is good and appropriate for man, why things would not be better without suffering

The senseless death acquires a meaning only with the resurrection of Jesus to new life with God, as known by faith.  Only in the light of this new life from God does it become clear that the death was not in vain.  That God who seems to have left him without support in the public gaze, did in fact sustain him through death.  That God had not forsaken him who felt God's abandonment as no one had ever felt it before.  That human suffering and death thus acquires a meaning that man as he suffers and dies simply cannot produce himself, which can only be given to him by someone who is wholly other, by God himself. 

Cannot the already completed suffering and death of this One also reveal a hidden meaning in the otherwise meaningless suffering and death of the many?  Man's suffering remains suffering, death remains death, past suffering is not made not to have happened, present suffering is not rendered innocuous nor future suffering made impossible. Suffering and death remain as an attack on man's life.  Suffering is not to be reinterpreted belittled or glorified.  Nor is it to be accepted stoically, apathetically, unemotionally.  And certainly, it should not be sought masochistically, making asceticism a source of pleasure.  It is to be fought by every human means - as must be made clearer later - in both the individual and the social sphere, in both persons and structures.  

------------------------

Breaking in more directly as a political blogger. 

Behind this last paragraph is a catalog of the pathological ways in which people become obsessed with and controlled by suffering and death, pain and, in much of the living out of that pathology, evil.  If a lot of that pathology is attributable to religion - some, though not nearly as much of that attribution, fair - as much of it and more can be attributed to atheism.  The malignant content of popular culture, such things as the gladiatorial games of the Roman Empire (abolished during the Christian period) bull fighting, bear and badger baiting, fox hunting, big game hunting, sexual sadism, the promotion of sado-masochism (one of the most disgusting and bizarre things held up as a libertarian "value" in modernism, Camus could see where that led even as the "feminist" girlfriend of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir made him a symbol of "freedom" of the twisted form that takes in so much of modernism. 

In 1886 Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced "sadism" as a pathological term, and De Sade -- both the man and his writings -- became a subject for psychiatrists. The avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire dubbed him "the Divine Marquis" and "the freest spirit that ever lived," and later he became a hero to the Surrealist movement. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Albert Camus condemned De Sade as a spiritual forerunner of the Fascists and the Stalinists, but Michel Foucault credited him with giving the Western world "the possibility of transcending its reason in violence." De Sade's works are now published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, an honor reserved for acknowledged classics, and their prestige in academic and critical circles has never been higher.

And Camus is more than matched by today's ringing endorsement of any and all expressions of cruelty as "freedom," to be listed as a protected "right"  as in the Supreme Court decision protecting sadistic pornography, even that in which prostitutes in high heals stomp small animals to death.   In the atheist establishment of the late 20th century such sexual sadism as is guaranteed in the adult sexual use of children was considered to be such a value that the porn and pedophilia "rights" advocating editor of the Dutch magazine (pedophile ring) "Paidika"  Vern Bullough was not only the "human sexuality editor" at the Regnery of American atheism, Prometheus, he was named a "Humanist of the Year" by the "Humanists".   He was hardly the only figure in organized and cultural atheism who was an advocate of even that advocacy for the most exploitative and damaging use of innocent people. 

And that doesn't even make a dent in the entirely secular, often opposed by religion, often not only defended by participated in promotion and protection of an obsession with and glorification of pain and evil.  There is certainly the cult of death of the type of which Nazism was only one species, much of that deriving from Darwinism, especially as articulated by his foremost European champion, Ernst Haeckel.  Marxism with its adoration of violence and killing, even when that is named by the euphemism  "struggle" glories in pain and evil.  Anarchism is guaranteed to result in little else as gangsters vie for control - do I need to remind you that the anarchist goddess Emma Goldman adored Nietzsche for his inversion of morals?  And there are the more cold-blooded expressions of the same thing in the French, English, Scottish, American etc. enlightenments.  I would say that the romantic obsession of gothic literature is also an expression of the same thing.*

When you remove morality that can't be articulated in science or mathematics from the discourse of freedom and rights, that is a guaranteed result.  And that doesn't get to other pain, disease and death that is routinely involved in the pathological uses of sex, all of that intimately connected with the evils of inequality and the exercise of power by those who have power and strength through natural or entirely man-made means. 

All of that could not possibly be more relevant to the question of evil, the question of pain and suffering, much of which the very same ideological atheists who use the question of pain and evil as a polemical weapon come down heavily on the side of the freedom of those who can use others to be free to use them.  That is always, in my reading of history, going to be the main effect of the 18th century, enlightenment ideology, a few minor examples aside.  The articulation of freedom in the anti-Christian ideology of that cultural movement and even in the nominal Christianity that sought to modify Christianity to be compatible with it on the terms of materialist scientism - see Jefferson, as an example - will come to support pain and evil for some and the guaranteed callousness of even those who suffer less as they enjoy their unequally endowed freedom and "rights".  

---------------

In the light of the suffering and death of this One who senselessly suffers and dies only one thing can be said, but this is decisive;  even manifestly senseless suffering and death can have a meaning, can acquire a meaning.  A hidden meaning.  Man cannot himself attach this meaning to suffering, but he can accept it in light of the perfect suffering and the dying of this One.  A meaning is not given automatically  no wishful thinking is to be satisfied, no glorification of suffering proclaimed, no tranquilizers provided and no cheap consolation offered.  But a meaning is offered which can be freely accepted.  Man has to decide.  He can reject this -hidden - meaning;  in spite, cynicism or despair.  He can also accept it;  in believing trust in him who endowed the senseless suffering and death of Jesus with meaning.  Protest, rebellion or frustration then become superfluous.  Despair is at an end. 

The Christian, looking to the raising up of the One sufferer to life, has himself the resurrection not behind him, but before him.  Suffering remains an evil.  But with trust in God it is not absolute evil which - as in Buddhism - would have to be dissolved in a nirvana by denying the will to live.  Only separation from God is absolute evil and apart from God evil has no meaning.  Suffering belongs to man.  It belongs in fact to the fullness of man's life in this world' even love is linked with suffering.  Man is meant to reach life through suffering.  Reason can never show why this is so,  why this is good and appropriate for man, why things would not be better without suffering.  But, with trust in God, in the certain ope of a revelation of its meaning at the consummation, it can be accepted as meaningful even at the present time in the light of the suffering, death and new life of Jesus. 

As I have been pointing out this week, those who most often raise the "question of evil, pain, suffering" do so, not looking for an answer but to use against one very set definition of God as all powerful and all good at the same time.  Of course they are asking that of people and, unsurpisingly, the people asked have never been able to come up with an answer that will satisfy those asking it - or themselves, by the way.  It is no surprise to religious people that this is a hard question, the question of evil, in that articulation of it, is a mystery to those who hold the only possible framing in which the distinction between good and evil can be given a solid foundation, in the will of God, it's not as if people who accept that belief haven't been trying to find an answer to that from before the time the story of Job was invented.  The book of Job is such a developed and sophisticated treatment of the problem that it, itself, must be the product of a long cultural history which must, as well as belief, contain both doubts and the unhelpful religiosity of Job's comforters.  

But as I have pointed out, the atheist-materialist devotees of scientism, the anti-Christian-anti-Jewish-anti-Islamic hecklers have got nothing better.  They've got nothing, that they promise nothing doesn't change that at all.  The Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all of us into God, that consummation of the Creation in the end, have a plausible promise of understanding, an end to the suffering we know in this life.  I would still mark that as a point for belief.  

*  I would not, though, say that the paintings of the great Boston painter, Hyman Bloom, of decaying corpses is the same thing though I don't think he realized how easily they could be taken as part of that same adoration of pain and death.   His intention was mystical, showing through color the freeing of the soul, or so those who knew him said.  It's a lesson in how dangerous it is to use the most extreme of symbols that could easily be mistaken in their intent.   Those who copied him, especially later photographers had a malignant and sensational intent using similar imagery.  

One of those I've critisized in the past, Andreas Serrano, shows that the visual artist who spends most of their time creating sensations by the use of content free visual content fraught with potent associations is liable to not be understood.   His recent exhibition that uses Trump junk bought on E-bay has apparently not achieved what he intended it to.   Though, if the description of his intent given in that article is accurate, he understands more of it than many others.   Trump, like Serrano, is a creation of the mass media.  The article points out,  

Among the many objects with his visage, signature, or name (or his family’s and fellow con men and con women) are items spouting porn-y headlines, branded resort souvenirs, sponsorship logos, mementos of his failed businesses and golf courses, foreclosure notices he took out on others and that were taken out on him, and evidence of the never-ending coverage by his most important 30-year enabler: the press. See the numerous New York Post covers featuring racy stories about Trump’s divorces and bad business deals. See the Post’s “Best Sex I Ever Had”—supposedly a quote from his soon-to-be second wife, Marla Maples, that turned out to have been phoned in and spoken by Trump himself masquerading as a Trump Organization spokesperson named “John Barron.” (The reporter recorded it. Trump denied it was him. This is one sick fuck.) See his face on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Spy, TV Guide, People, GQ, Fortune, Palm Springs Life, The National Enquirer, this magazine, and many others, not to mention the endless promotion by television networks. Having taken it all in, I find it hard to feel that the collection merely tells the story of one man, no matter how flamboyantly fame-crazy, tasteless, ruthless, and full of entitlement and rage. It is a portrait of us, America.

When I saw the phrase "30-year enabler," I realized that for most of that 30 years the free press had given Hillary Clinton the exact opposite treatment, including the elite New York City press that was the most to blame for creating Trump.  That is the entirely successful answer to the question of who created the evil that is Trump, the pain and suffering he has gloried in creating. 

"let me know when Jesus cures you" - Hate Mail

Certainly among the best poets in English that America has produced is the reclusive Emily Dickinson who, among other things posed the question of evil and a rather dim hope that the incomprehensible aspects of it will be revealed in the coming life.

I reason, Earth is short —
And Anguish — absolute —
And many hurt,
But, what of that?

I reason, we could die —
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?

I reason, that in Heaven —
Somehow, it will be even —
Some new Equation, given —
But, what of that?

If there is a better short presentation of the issues and the seeming fact that an answer doesn't appear to be had that will satisfy REASON that she is using to consider the questions, comparing that effort to balancing an equation, that such a rational and universally accepted answer, doesn't appear to be available, I'd like to know where that presentation is.   

And, though she doesn't state it, she wants an effective answer - perhaps even one that will relive the anguish as well as doubts, something that seems to be secondary or absent in such ruminations and certainly is absent from the polemical use of the issue.   Certainly in her other work Dickinson, flourishing in the middle of a dangerous century in which separation by death was a guaranteed common experience, practically makes separation by death the equivalent of hell, at least in human experience.  

The attempted mixture of mathematical reasoning and faith in what was certainly a very Christian concept of heaven which reasoning is left empty, nothing more than a content free question at the end - the empty evacuation that is the core substance of anti-religious ideology - stands for me as a short version of what the 18th century Unitarianism of Priestley and Jefferson turns into,  as well as all of the "enlightenment" effort to turn mathematical reasoning into the one and only and ultimately unsatisfying method of granting legitimacy to our thoughts about our experience.  

I think it has that effect in real life because mathematics and science are inapt tools to deal with that most central and vital issue of human experience in its most acute forms, the forms that medicine cannot address, the decay that "the best Vitality cannot exceed".   It is like using a hammer to try to manufacture carbon dioxide or isolate oxygen.   Clearly after the long effort to try to use mathematics and the debased though more generally useful form of that which is science doesn't get you to an answer.  

As I said, the experience of pain and evil is personal to every single animal who experiences, the most searingly personal experience even when it is the a second-hand experience of loss of a loved one.  It is unreasonable to expect something that yields impersonal and universally acknowledged ideas,  impersonal "truths" which are as cool as room temperature and devoid of emotional content, to be the one and only way to an answer to the question of suffering and evil.   One of the greater dangers of science and mathematics is that it serves evil at least as well as it serves the good.  The best that gives you is the useless question that Emily Dickinson realized is the result of that. 

Emily Dickinson, somewhat isolated in her father's house except for her brief though excellent years of education at the Amherst Academy, was certainly heavily influenced by the transcendentalism that the Unitarianism in the eastern area of her state was devolving into.   I'd say that she was one of the two best writers of that era though I'm not sure she would have considered herself to be part of any movement.  She consulted one of the lesser figures of the movement for advice, got some bad advice and didn't follow it.  She certainly was a better writer and clearer thinker than Emerson and less neurotic than Thoreau. Famously, she refused to be involved with the Calvinism that her family was steeped in and stopped going to church.  Though I think the atheists laying claim to her could only be done if, as I suspect, they never read her poems or letters. 

Her repeated question doesn't get an answer in the only framing that someone living in the light of the distant de-Calvinated Harvard of the middle 19th century would have thought was reliable because its answer depends on making a choice of what to believe on other grounds. 

I can't say that my views of Unitarianism and other attempts to paste Christianity to mathematics and science have not suffered enormously in the past twenty years. That is matched by my increasing skepticism as to the status of the "enlightenment" and the romantic form of that which has dominated Western intellectualism since the 18th century.  Oddly, the thing that did the most damage to my view of Unitarianism was listening to and thinking about what I heard presented when they had the Cambridge Forum on as a public radio show in Maine, straight from the heart of the Unitarian world in Cambridge.   

If they hadn't managed to attach Universalism to it the Unitarian movement would probably have died out by now except as local efforts to maintain some of the beautiful churches which either were built as Unitarian churches or which devolved into them from Congregational or Presbyterian ones.  It's sort of like the efforts to maintain the old Grange Halls as community activity centers when there aren't farmers or old folks left who want to keep the quasi-Masonic falderal going.   Though there is some service-committee work that gets done by Unitarians sometimes, which is admirable but I don't think Unitarianism is going to do much of anything to solve the problem of evil.  Just as I don't think you're ever going to reason your way out of it.  You have to choose your way out of it. 

Dusan Bogdanovic, Chromatic Prelude and Fugue, Judicael Perroy, Guitar

It's been a while since I posted any of Bogdanovic's music, some of the finest music being composed these days.

An Answer Maybe The Answer

Of course Jesus' suffereing cannot be taken merely "existentially" as a symbol ("the fact of being dead") for our personal understanding of our existence as involved in death.  Nor can it be understood purely "futuristically"" as promise of a utopian freedom from suffering, sin and death, still lying completely in the future.  Nor finally highly "speculatively" as in inner-trinitarian (eternal) historyof suffering of a crucified god, enacted dialectical between God and God, God against God;  Jesus being directly instead of indirectly identified with God and the distinction between Father and Son played down in favor or one divine "nature" or "substance" as understood by later Hellenistic or especially Latin speculation on the Trinity. [The footnote contains a reference to criticism of Moltmann's trinitarian interpretation of the history of salvation by J. B. Metz.  I tried to access it but couldn't, perhaps others can. ]

The historical suffering and death of Jesus therefore may not be dissolved either by existential reduction or by utopian futurization, nor by lofty speculation on argumentative theology, but must constantly be narrated afresh as what it was.  But, unless we are content with a scarcely helpful naive repetition of the biblical stories or even with a new acceptance of myths (like the descent into hell),  historical-critical reflection perused with an eye on the present is also necessary.  This sort of reflection has show us how Jesus' Passion was so shattering just because it was consistent with his whole action.  From the standpoint of the official religion the condemnation of the heretic, pseudo-prophet, blasphemer and seducer of the people to an ignominious death was quite right and made it obvious that he had nothing to do with the true God.  In his death he was forsaken by men and, as we saw, his abandonment by God was also unparalleled and boundless;  left utterly alone by him on whose presence he had staked everything.  It was all in vain;  a pointless death, which cannot be made into a mystery. 

One of the points in the Gospels which is most incomprehensible to anyone holding a traditional (medieval, monarchical) view of Jesus (at least as taught by much of Western and some of Eastern Christianity) is when in Mark and Matthew, he cries from the cross, Father why have you forsaken me? 

Though there is a path towards understanding that in Paul's statement that Jesus was like us in all things but sin, it would mean that in the agony of a death by crucifixion,  at the very height of the pain and suffering, what Hans Kung notes is a circumstance that brings us to experience the very point at which our life, our body, our human person, our minds comes into its most direct and agonizing connection with a universe which, as the materialist sees it, wants to destroy us, that has no meaning, goal or good.  Jesus was the equal of others who were crucified, tortured, suffered the agony and fear and terror of death.   I don't think Jesus would have said that merely to demonstrate a point to witnesses so it could be told,  what they witnessed was the most personal and concrete of experiences of the person, Jesus.  I think at that point Jesus was his most intensely human. 

Some point out that the idea is the same as at the beginning of Psalm 22 

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
I have cried desperately for help,
    but still it does not come.
During the day I call to you, my God,
    but you do not answer;
I call at night,
    but get no rest.

Which is a pretty good statement of the problem of pain and evil and something which, since he quoted so many of the Psalms, Jesus would have had on the tip of his tongue. 

If Jesus was consciously (or by attribution) calling attention to the Psalm is open to speculation.  The Gospels in question don't give much to go on.  In the Psalm the poet who lived on to finish his thought that starts out in a long doxology:

But you are enthroned as the Holy One,
    the one whom Israel praises.
Our ancestors put their trust in you;
    they trusted you, and you saved them.
They called to you and escaped from danger;
    they trusted you and were not disappointed.

But Jesus - in a unified combination of the four Gospels - asks for a drink, is given wine in a sponge on a branch of hyssop - declares that it is finished or consummated or the debt has been paid (depending on how you would translate the Greek word), commends his soul into the hand of God and dies.  It is unknowable if he was referencing this Psalm as a statement of his faith as that terrible experience happened to him. 

What I think this shows is that in agony, at the point of death,  even Jesus, "more than a prophet" could feel the very human fear, agony and experience of total abandonment which is the very human experience of evil.  That is something that certainly many people experience as their own death.  In that Jesus may be at his most human.    

I don't think there would have been any reason for any of his followers or any of his supporters to have bothered to tell or record that, it's a common enough event in human experience and fear.  In the context of their time and place and culture, it was an ignominious and common death meted out to the lowest among them.  As Kung also points out, the only reason for giving an account of the Crucifixion is that the same people also experienced the Resurrection or heard from it by people they trusted to tell them the truth who said they experienced the risen Jesus.   And there wouldn't be much of a reason for them to care about even that if they didn't also believe that his Resurrection was relevant to them and their loved ones.   The deist god of deism isn't anyone anyone has to care about much, like the morality of material determinism, it is meaningless. It just happens.  Yet both of those are considered preferable by the foremost wielders of the question of pain and evil for reasons their own ideology can't articulate. 

But the record of the Crucifixion of Jesus might show why death might be necessary if there is a resurrection, that we must leave the state of being we are accustomed to in human experience, the experience we have through our merely physical bodies, for more than that.  That is my answer, at least for now.  It also, I will note, matches what those who experience "clinical death" and come back to tell of their experiences, in many cases, and other testimonial evidence.  If you're holding out for science about any of this, you are either posing something you don't really believe or you are terrible naive about what science is and can do. 

That would do nothing to lessen our experience of suffering but it would leave us the hope that even Jesus included in that cry of agony, that God, our Creator, our Parent, is still there even at that most horribly intense point of human physical exposure and experience.  The only way for any of it to make any kind of sense, to be any kind of good - if you are going to have evil, you're not going to get away without having good - is by there being more than the ending in terrible, useless, meaningless death.  If you leave it there, your questioning about pain and evil are as useless as the god of conveience invented by the atheists who call themselves "deists".  

Hate Mail

As I said a couple of days ago, if atheists want to raise "the question of evil" as a weapon against religion, to encourage the choice of atheism, they don't get to do that halfway.  They have to provide an alternative which is superior to what they want others to reject.   Here's the passage from Hans Kung you seek to turn around against religion. 

Of course the question constantly recurs, what sort of God is this incomprehensible, unconcerned, aloof from all suffering, who leaves man sitting, struggling, protesting, perishing in his immense desolation?  

As Kung said of that:

But this question too can be reversed.  

 If you think atheism provides for an alternative to the description of God in that which is more of an answer to the question of pain, the question of evil, where is it? 

Is it in Richard Dawkins or the myriads of atheists who would agree with his statement of atheist faith? 

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

At least the incomprehensible God is said to, perhaps incomprehensibly to human discernment, posses good, to have purpose to command justice, to require the exact opposite of evil and pitiless indifference.  So, atheism doesn't score a point there. 

Is there some commandment to make moral choices, thus at least lessening pain in this life or even to take the pain of others seriously, as something we should care about in Jerry Coyne or those who would agree with this? 

Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains.  We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think that the truth of determinism should be quietly shelved for the good of the masses. 

If I thought he'd give me a straight answer, I would like to go through how Jerry Coyne, or any materialist determinist can tease out a "good of the masses" out of their ideological position.  I don't think it can be done, and, as a superior scientist there when he said that proved, they won't buy it.  It is remarkably in line with that passage mentioned here the other day from Danton's Death put in the mouth of the atheist hero Thomas Payne by Georg Buchner, if your nature is to be a nice guy you do that, if your nature is to be Adolf Eichmann, you do that. 

As an aside, never, ever, in a jillion years think that someone who calls the human population other than their elite "the masses" is ever going to do anything except try to use them as a natural resource for their own ends.  Under materialism everyone is material for use or disposal. 

How about the nuclear physicist whose snarky put-down of the moral dimension of religion has made him a minor idol in the pop-atheist hierarchy - even inspiring a D list rock band -Steven Weinberg?  Whose discourse dissolving moral responsibility I went to the bother of transcribing from the Youtube of  Sean Carroll's weekend camp for famous atheists a few years back, where I got Coyne on morality from, as well. 

... There are competing things which are all good like happiness and truth.  For example, we sacrifice some happiness when we accept the truth that we're not going to have life after death.  Should we tell other people that they're not going to live after they die?   It probably will reduce their happiness on the other hand truth has a value of its own how do you balance truth and happiness there isn't any algorithm for balancing that.   I think you just have to accept that there is  no postulate that allows you to judge how much happiness you're willing to give up for how much truth. 

Even people who accept all this will say, all right we're not going to agree on what is the good but at least we can agree on the fundamental principle of morality that something like Rawls original condition [I think he meant "Original Position"]  that we should not treat other people worse than we treat ourselves. Rebecca [Goldstein] was saying something like this that everyone equally deserves whatever is good, happiness or whatever it is.  That's not the way I feel either.   And I think it's probably not the way most of you feel if you think about it because. I could probably increase the total amount of happiness by making my family live on rice and beans and live in a one room apartment and just barely keep enough money to keep us alive and healthy and send all of the rest of the money to poor parts of the world where it would do to me.  I'm not going to do that I'm not going to ....  and I well, I'm not confessing immorality.  I'm saying that my moral feelings tell me I should be loyal to my family.

Similarly when my university tries to recruit a bright young star in physics I suppose I could calculate,  well,  he could do more good for some other university and the greater good would imply we shouldn't go after him let some other university go after him. I don't care, I care about my university I'm loyal to my university similarly.  So there loyalty is a value it's not an absolute value I wouldn't cause, like Edward the Third,  I wouldn't cause the hundred years war to advance the interests of my family.  But it is one of these things where we have no algorithm for balancing loyalty against distributive justice.

And I think we have to live with that.  I think we have to live with the fact that although we can reason and try to uncover what our moral feelings are.   And if we get into that I think a very good example would be arguing about abortion ...  maybe I'll come back to that in the discussion.  

We can reason, the reasoning uncovers how we feel morally and perhaps allows us to identify areas of agreement so we can cooperate with each other and bring about what we want. 

I think in the end we have to live with not having a moral philosophy that really works in a decisive way.  I think we have to live the unexamined life.  I think this is part of the tragedy of the human condition just like we have no absolute way of determining that Mozart is better than Led Zeppelin we feel it but it's not something that we can argue,  we can rationally show.  We have to live with the fact that...  this came up yesterday.... when we discover the fundamental laws of physics from which all in some sense follows, that all other principles follow,  we won't know why they're true.  This is something that we have to accept, that the position of human beings is tragic and part of the tragedy,  that there  is no way of deciding moral issues on the basis of - well there is no way of deciding moral postulates which should govern our actions.  And in fact we don't have moral postulates that govern our actions when we behave morally. 

That is vapid mush which I can assure you will do absolutely nothing to solve the question of evil, or pain - apart from, maybe, Steve Weinberg's nearest and dearest and HIS university department.  

That is what comes of making the choices that atheists, especially ideological, actively anti-religious make.  And they make it for various reasons.  Let's be honest about this, a huge part of that is because affluent people don't like to give their stuff to poor people, they don't like the egalitarian aspects of Christianity or Judaism but, since the revelation of the Shoah, it has not been as fashionable to attack Judaism as it still is to attack Christianity - no matter what lie you tell as you do so.  

Some of it, though not as much, is a result of insisting that reality is in line with materialistic scientism when those not only do absolutely nothing to come up with an explanation of the question of pain, as we can see above, they exacerbate the problem.  The worst regimes of the 20th century were materialistic in their ideologies, Marxist in those who explained themselves by Marxism,  Darwinist for the Nazis and various facists though all of those regimes were far more based in the merely vulgar materialism that is most universally named "gangsterism".   I think that the second thing that that atheist avatar of atheist ersatz moralism, Weinberg named as the only legitimate focus of his moral discernment, his university department, shares a bit in common with a gang mob.  

Atheist Attempts At Humanism Inevitably Lead Into A Maze of Inhumanity But You Can Choose The Way Out

For anyone who is just joining in, beginning last weekend I have been going through a long passage from Hans Kung's On Being A Christian dealing with the famous question of evil, or pain, or suffering, depending on which aspect of that is being focused on.   You can access the previous posts from the sidebar.

Continuing where I left off:

In face of the overwhelming reality of suffering in the history of mankind and in the individual human life, for suffering, doubting, despairing man there is still an alternative to the rebellion, for instance, of an Ivan Karamazov against this world of God which he found unacceptable or to the revolt of an Albert Camus, who points like Dostoevsky to the suffering of the innocent creature. Instead of rising up defiantly against the power of the gods, like emancipated, autonomous Prometheus, or constantly rolling the rock up the mountain and seeing it roll down again, like Sisyphus, he can adopt the attitude of Job.  Despite all the suffering of this world, he can place an absolute, unshakable trust in the incomprehensible God.  Even for Job this had nothing to do with resignation and passivity.  Certainly it is possible to say that we cannot believe in God when we see the immense suffering of the world.  But can this not be reversed.  It is only if there is a God that we can look at all at this immense suffering in the world.  It is only in trusting faith in the incomprehensible, always greater God that man can stride in justifiable hope through that broad, deep river;  conscious of the fact that a hand is stretched out to him across the dark gulf of suffering and evil.  

I will break in here to point out something again, that the atheist alternatives to dealing with evil, pain and suffering, don't really deal with it at all, they sidestep it or in the political forms of it, they seek to use the suffering of those who suffer as a means of gaining power for the gang bosses who inevitably end up rising in power in any materialist scheme of governance.  As we are finding in the United States, as Christianity turns to post-Christianity, that can happen in a nominal republic which gives up something as obvious as valuing the truth over lies in the mass media as part of the process of secularization under "no establishment". 

The heroic figures of Soviet and Chinese Communism might suffer and struggle, even to the point of martyrdom, allegedly for the purpose of creating a better life for their loved ones or, in that most phonied up and cheap of substitutes for religion,  patriotism, for their "country" but in reality everything they do by doing that benefits the dictator class.  As the surviving members of the Bolshevik movement in the Stalinist USSR discovered, part of that struggle eventuated in their liquidation through the show trials widely approved of by Western intellectuals, though there were a few dissenters.  Their pain, suffering, the evil they suffer and cause only ends up serving the evil that will create more pain and suffering for the intended beneficiaries of their martyrdom.   

Needless to say, those who, struggled, suffered pain,  risked martyrdom to bring Communism to the Soviet states didn't solve those issues we're looking into by their suffering.  They didn't go a millimetre forward in dispelling pain or suffering or evil  they benefited the atheist-materialist-scientistic dictatorship which brought unprecedented suffering to all but the upper elites of those atheist paradises.  Indeed, it was in the atheist paradises that the most terrible mass murder and oppression not only happened but was intentionally committed.   The Soviet Union, other Marxist states so much admired by so many Western intellectuals, most of them atheists,  many of them university teachers, journalists, authors, poets, a few composers, some scientists, some of whom wrote their propaganda using the "question of evil" against religion in the west even as the lauded and supported the Soviet and later atheist regimes.  Most ironic of the supporters of Soviet Communism were the unionists who did since one of the earliest things done as the Communists gained control was the abolition of real trade unions.  

On the other side of the broad, deep river of struggle for the atheist Marxist isn't a hand stretched out to lift him out but a hand about to dump an anvil into his. Atheism always does that in the end.  

The mention of Camus in this paragraph is particularly apt because he is a very good example of the ineffectiveness that comes of trying to treat these problems while rejecting God and ending up as an intellectual of absurdism who favors the absurdist political futility of anarchism.  Camus is an especially frustrating intellectual because he has, sometimes, a moral core that I don't find in those most often associated with him, Sartre, especially.  But, rejecting the moral confidence that faith in God can give, he seems to me to always be ineffective.  All that writing and if anything has ever come of it,  I'd like to know what it was.  I especially get the mention of Sisyphus about and by Camus because that could be a very good symbol of that kind of intellectual activity.  Activity,  calling it an effort would seem to be granting it more direction than I see in it.  Great writer but I can't say I respect his thinking except here and there. 

I think to get beyond the kind of maze that modern thought inevitably leads you into you have no choice except to make a choice, you can't rely on some objective automatic algorithm that is going to do it for you, to make that choice for you, if you want to maintain the fictitious separation of the two, it can't come as "knowledge" it has to come from the choice to believe.  It takes real work, the choice to believe and maintain belief, it isn't like learning your arithmetic facts.  As pain is a profoundly personal and individual experience, the way out of it has to be through a profound and individual choice by the person.*  

Of course the question constantly recurs, what sort of God is this incomprehensible, unconcerned, aloof from all suffering, who leaves man sitting, struggling, protesting, perishing in his immense desolation?  But this question too can be reversed.  Is God really so aloof from all suffering - as we imagine in our human way and assume in all our protests - as philosophers in particular think he is?  Does not the very suffering and death of Jesus make God appear in a different light?

For Job all that had become clear was the incomprehensibility of the God who delivers men from suffering.  Man is to place his believing trust i this incomprehensibility, even if he understands nothing and has to die anyway;  an attitude which is so difficult to maintain in concrete suffering and which - to judge from the written records - found little support even in Israel.  But in Jesus' suffering and death has there not been revealed by the incomprehensible God a definitive delivery from suffering which goes beyond all the incomprehensibility of God and which transforms suffering and death to life and to the fulfillment of longing?  Does this not make possible a faith understanding reality in a very different way, even though this understanding faith always remains faith?  The fact of the suffering of every man cannot be canceled even in the light of Jesus.  Some remaining doubt is always possible.  But from this standpoint the right attitude of man to suffering, the relative value and hidden meaning of suffering become clear. 

Even Jesus did not explain suffering, but endured it as innocent in the sight of God, endured it however - unlike Job - to the bitter end.  His story was different;  real, not fictional.  His end was different;  not a "happy ending" not a restoration to a prosperous life.  His suffering was different;  the outcome of his life and definitive, up to death.  In the light of Jesus' definitive Passion, his suffering and death, the passion of each and every  man, the passion of mankind as a whole, could acquire a meaning which the story of Job - calling simply for absolute faith and trust -  cannot convey.  

What to believe is laid out for you but the choice to believe it is left up to you.  You are totally free to do it or not, if you do not you cannot then blame what you rejected for the results your rejection got you.  And you cannot, then, hold it against those who did choose it.  But the choice has to be real, it can't only be the adoption of a word or the claim that you have gained a new status.  There is a lot of profession of faith but a lot of that claim is betrayed by a life that demonstrates a lack of trust and a refusal to live the life required by that choice.  I would say among the more convincing signs is that it would make the person who chooses this easier to live with, less willing to cause pain and suffering and to do evil.  Few of us choose to go all the way with that,  I certainly haven't yet.  But imagine how awful I'd be if I wasn't trying.  

Staying angry with God isn't going to get you much in the way of relief. 

*  That, of course, only is possible for someone who is old enough or mature enough or who is aware of that choice. Those who cant do those things suffer, sometimes unbearably.  And it doesn't mean that even someone who makes that choice will never suffer pain, evil again in this life. I will address the last words of Jesus as he was dying later. It does, though, allow some understanding of both why it is necessary for us to not participate in creating pain, suffering and evil, something which absolutely no atheist ideology or philosophy gives, why it is necessary to perform, literally, all of the human commandments in The Law, The Prophets and the Gospel which command us to relieve the suffering of others and to understand that there is hope even for those for whom all of those have failed, completely in this life.  Without that you can either be left with libertine cynicism and self-gain or if you are left in contact with the vestiges of a moral core, the resort to absurdism that Camus took.  Neither of which work to lessen pain and evil.  I doubt if Camus had lived he would have stuck with absurdism.  He didn't stick with all that much in previous positions he took. 

RMJ has written an excellent commentary on some of these posts.   I have to admit, I didn't get the penguin allusion till I looked it up.  I don't remember that skit though I know I must have seen it. 

Bite Me, Baby, For I Have Sinned Against The Secular Order And Toxic Masculinity - Oh, Yeah, Hate Mail

Anyone who tells you that entertainment isn't the most influential and almost uniformly malignant form of religious observance in the United States (especially if you include sports and hate talk TV and radio) is certainly missing the predominant feature of not only the degenerated entity called our "intellectual life" but also the commonly believed degenerated entity of our "folk culture".  I would bet that at least 50% of what is called "Christianity" in our country, at this time, would more honestly be considered an aspect of that church of Mammon.   

I have sinned against the central authority of that in the United States, the neo-pagan Roman style Temple city of Hollywood, yet again.  I delight in dissing the movies the way that a puerile pop-culture vulture or tenured university philosophy fop delights in repeating the rote-learned tropes of anti-Christian impiety but for what are more grown-up purposes.  I figure like with my blasphemy against the cult of the Founders and the Constitution and even the holy of holies, the Bill of Rights, someone's got to try to jar that frozen but broken bolt loose.


There are rare, very, very rare exceptions to the nearly uniform awfulness that the movies are.   I don't see the more recent ones because I don't go to the movies, I don't watch them on DVD very often, though I do see clips from time to time.  

That video I posted about the now ubiquitous use of male rape, especially prison rape as a comedy trope EVEN IN CHILDRENS' CARTOONS, FOR FUCKSAKE! - which in a decent culture would be as vile as jokes about lynching or the Holocaust are (that both have been, in the case of the lynching of Black People and, as I'm equally horrified and enraged to discover, is currently being entered into the sad sack of "comedy" topics, the Shoah) led to me watching more on the channel of its creator.  I was surprised to find that he also created the Buffy vs. Twilight video and the Donald Duck encounters Glenn Beck ones which are masterpieces of satire, the real thing, not the crap that gets called that.   

One of his other longer commentaries is The Fantastic Masculinity of Newt Scamander, about a movie spinoff of the Harry Potter series which I hadn't known about since, apparently, the stories aren't in novels but only in screen plays so I had missed J. K. Rowling's invention of a character who might lead me to watch the movies.   I watched two of the H.P. movies after having read the books and did not like the movies, at all though I quite liked the books.   If she wrote them as books, I'd probably go out of my way to read them, though my nieces who I read the books to are too old for that now.  

The excellent Jonathan Mcintosh who makes these points out that the movie critics largely disliked the character of Newt Scamander exactly because he wasn't the typical Hollywood type of manly man, pointing out that even the boy Harry Potter is more typical of the stereotypes that the movies love to recreate, endlessly, among the things that make the movies almost uniformly a deadening mind dulling waste of time and billions of dollars.  I am generally allergic to Brit, especially English heroic types but what I saw of Newt Scamander as played by this actor was extremely appealing and the description of the plot sounded fresh and a welcomed relief.   I think it's to Mcintosh's credit that he thought out his fresh take on these topics so well that it could make even a movie hater like me kind of think I might like to give this one a try.  

His other cultural criticism is pretty good, what I've sampled of it.  

Two Notes

Two notes.  First, I inadvertently posted a piece intended for this morning last night - wish Blogger would separate those two buttons.  

Second, I sloppily put a paragraph I'd written in bold italics yesterday, but didn't realize that till this morning.  If I hadn't pointed out the other day I do that to make sure people can't blame what I write on those quoted here, I'd probably not point that out but thought it should be. 

Oh, and third,  I've got a lot of work in the garden so I may not get to write anything else till tonight.  

Never say I've never delivered more than I promised. 

For many a person overwhelming suffering has been a stimulus to basic mistrust in regard to reality as a whole, but for many another a stimulus to basic truth.

"Why do I suffer?  This is the rock of atheism.  The slightest throb of pain even if it stirs merely in an atom, makes a rent in creation from top to bottom."  Georg Buchner, in his play Danton's Death attributes these sentiments to Thomas Paine.*  Our attitude to suffering is connected at the deepest level with our attitude to God and to reality as a whole.  In suffering man reaches his extreme limit, the decisive question of his identity, of the sense and nonsense of his life, of reality as a whole.  Suffering constantly proves to be the crucial test of trust in God and of basic trust, provoking decisions.  Where is trust in God more challenged than in wholly concrete suffering?  For many a person concrete suffering has been the occasion of his unbelief, for many another the occasion of his faith.  And where is trust in reality as a whole more challenged than in face of all the suffering and evil in the world and in one's own life?  For many a person overwhelming suffering has been a stimulus to basic mistrust in regard to reality as a whole, but for many another a stimulus to basic truth.  

I will break in here to point out that this is not a romanticized view of pain as producing a superior personality, a superior character.  It is no promotion of seeking pain as a fetish or a path to ennoblement or sainthood.   It is a presentation as to some of the outcomes of suffering and pain.  I don't think Hans Kung is judging the person for whom the shattering experience of this "extreme limit, the decisive question" of their identity leads to unbelief, a failure of belief.  

I don't find anything judgmental in his statement of both options as a response to pain.  I think the unbelief of someone who has reached it as a consequence of profound pain has to be respected.  No one else could expect to be able to talk them out of it.  The articulations, acting as later day Job's comforters, especially from someone who has not experienced the same kind of things, are not going to overturn their own conclusions based in their own experience.  

In her book, Quest for the Living God, The Crucified God of Compassion,  Elizabeth A. Johnson says:

I remember the day I took a train from Munich to the concentration camp at Dachau.  The town of Dachau itself dates from the Middle Ages and lies only a few stops on the suburban line out of the big city.  Having read extensively on the Holocaust I felt quasi-prepared for what I would encounter, although the impact of actually being in the presence of the bunkers and ovens was viscerally almost too powerful to bear.  There was one unexpected moment, though, that stunned my thought.  In the camp museum, amid the tools of torture and other paraphernalia, there hung a striped outfit worn by one inmate named Albert Mainslinger.  Next to it were displayed two pieces of paper, documents filled out when he entered and left the camp.  In 1939 his admission form listed his weight as 114kg (250 lbs) and, further down, his religion as Roman Catholic.  In 1945 his discharge form, signed by the American administrator of the camp, contained different information.  His weight was 41kg (90 lbs). On the line for religion was written Das Nichts, nothing.  I stared, struck silent.  Who can fathom the suffering - unjust imprisonment;  years of slow starvation; morning, noon, and night trying to evade the terror meted out by the guards;  unremitting hard labor in the cold and heat; people in agony all around; having no idea when this would ever end or if the next minute would bring his death.  As his body withered so too did his soul,  any trust in a good and gracious God evaporating away.  

Herr Mainslinger was one of the lucky ones, insofar as he survived.  Multiply his experience by three million other Gentiles who died in such places.  And then focus specifically on the six million Jewish people who were systematically rounded up and barbarically killed in the camps simply because they were Jews.  The force of this event's interruption to the religious project of speaking about God becomes clear. Theologians reflected that such evil is a surd, an irrational fore that cannot be made to fit meaningfully into a divine plan for the world.  Even to try to make it fit would be to tame the evil, to dilute its terror, to give it, albeit unintentionally, a right to exist.  Such attempts at realization drown out the voices of the victims.  And to allow that this event is even part of an overall divine plan for the world would be to make God into a monster, no mater how much one talks about divine goodness and power. The "fissure" in the classical pattern of thought is so great that in questing for the living God some theologians began to change the question about suffering itself.  The proper question is not why did god permit this to happen, or how can this be reconciled with divine governance of the world.  Rather thinking o the far side of the break brought about by this experience, the proper question becomes the anguished question where is God, where is God now?  

For good reason, Jewish religious thinkers have taken the lead in pursuing this question amid the shattering of faith's confidence. Taking different avenues of thought, various Jewish scholars have envisioned different answers.  We do not know where God was.  God was hidden, or silent or absent, or dead.  God's face was turned away.  God was there, suffering with the victims, weeping in their pain.  Or most radically, the only rational way to think about God after Auschwitz is to admit that God does not exist.   Whatever the theology, it leads to an ethical mandate;  Never Again.  

But "Never Again" never happened.  The period between the end of WWII and now has never seen a letup in the slaughter.  Looking for a listing of "agains" since the end of the Nazi death camps, there is no lack of documentation about the mass killing events.  Wikipedia starts with the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe (half a million to 2.2 million estimated deaths) the partition of India and a long list of genocides which is hardly complete (it doesn't mention the up to 20 million some estimate died in the Chinese Cultural Revolution) and it leaves many other mass slaughters out.   The 20th century was a century of genocides, many of the worst of them committed by entirely secular governments, some of the worst of those officially atheist, anti-religious dictatorships.  Though the democracies, including the United States have sponsored or supported some of the worst of it, the very countries that conducted the war trials after WWII as well.  

There is an enormous irony in that famous passage from Buchner's play, in that as a logical consequence of that claim,  when asked what moral he drew from that,  Payne says [in my very rough translation].  

Mercier. Und die Moral? 

And the moral of that? 

Payne. Erst beweist ihr Gott aus der Moral und dann die Moral aus Gott! - Was wollt ihr denn mit eurer Moral? 

First you prove God from morality and then morality from God!  What do you want to do with morality? 

Ich weiß nicht, ob es an und für sich was Böses oder was Gutes gibt, und habe deswegen doch nicht nötig, meine Handlungsweise zu ändern. 

I don't know if there is something evil or good of itself,  therefore I don't need to change my conduct.

Ich handle meiner Natur gemäß; was ihr angemessen, ist für mich gut und ich tue es, und was ihr zuwider, ist für mich bös und ich tue es nicht und verteidige mich dagegen, wenn es mir in den Weg kommt. 

I do what it is in my nature to do, what is in that nature, is good for me and I do it, what is against that nature is evil for me and I don't do it and deflect it form me when it gets in my way. 

Sie können, wie man so sagt, tugendhaft bleiben und sich gegen das sogenannte Laster wehren, ohne deswegen ihre Gegner verachten zu müssen, was ein gar trauriges Gefühl ist.

[more or less] You can maintain your personal integrity (do what comes naturally to you) and not bother other people who do what is in their nature, because that's bound to make you sad.  

Which is, certainly something that is in line with a devotion to an 18th 19th early century libertarian notion of secular liberty.  

The real Thomas Paine was attracted to violence, revolution (as was Buchner), which is why he almost got himself done in by his comrades during the French Revolution. Slated for execution, he was saved from the guillotine by merest chance a door being left open, hiding the chalked death mark - what some might call a miracle.  He was, of course, an active part in that enlightenment revolution that sent so many tens of thousands to their deaths, including many for their religion.  Though the lines are, of course, put in his mouth by a playwright who never knew him and who, perhaps, didn't understand the irony created by him using the real man to spout his ideas.  In many cases their own explanations for what the did prove that the genocidalists, those who led it, the ones who carried it out were following their own nature.  The Nazis considered their genocides to be them working out natural selection, their wars of imperial conquest, their gaining of "living space" in Poland and elsewhere, the working out of nature.  Marxists explained their genocides in somewhat different ways, depending, as well, on explanations from the physical sciences extended theoretically.  

I think one of the most important recent treatments of this topic is in the late James Cone's sermon which he gave in a number of forms, a number of times, The Cross And The Lynching Tree which I might go into, again.   I have never encountered an atheist on this topic who can come near to the meaning he derives from pain and murder and genocidal oppression.  


* Radio Drama - George Buchner - Danton's Death 

Danton's Death 

Georg Buchner's radical retelling of the fallout of the French Revolution adapted by Simon Scardifield.

It's 1794, and a new France is being born from the reign of terror that characterised the worst of the Revolution. Charismatic hedonist Danton, still tormented by his role in the killing of 1400 aristocrats in a single night, is losing his grip on power, and he is so tired. His political rival, the sober and focused Robespierre, is in the ascendant, and - with his efficient sidekick St Just - has power now over Danton's fate. But can Danton care enough to fight the terror that he himself set in motion?

Cast

Georges DANTON ..... Joseph Millson
Maximilien ROBESPIERRE ..... Khalid Abdalla
CAMILLE Desmoulins ..... Patrick Kennedy
MARION ..... Claire Harry
HERAULT-SECHELLES ..... Laurence Mitchell
HERRMAN ..... Adeel Akhtar
Thomas PAYNE ..... Sean Baker
LACROIX ..... David Seddon
LEGENDRE ..... Lloyd Thomas 
JULIE ..... Leah Brotherhead
ST JUST ..... Iain Batchelor
LUCILLE ..... Sally Orrock

Directed by Jessica Dromgoole

NOTES

Georg Buchner died in 1837 at the age of 23, by which time he had had only one play published, and none produced. His small legacy of work, remaining unproduced for nearly sixty years after his death, has come to represent some of the most exciting and radical theatre writing in the European Theatre canon.